Quotes from Jeanette Winterson

People do go back, but they don't survive, because two realities are claiming them at the same time. Such things are too much. You can salt your heart, or kill your heart, or you choose between the two realities. There is so much pain here.

Hay quien se cría en una colina y quien se cría en el valle. La mayoria lo hace en el llano. Yo vine a la vida inclinada, y así es como he vivido desde entonces.

Take no notice of anyone you don't respect.

I thought about the dog and was suddenly very sad; sad about her death, for my death, for all the inevitable dying that comes with change. There's no choice that doesn't mean a loss.

There are different kinds of treachery but betrayal is betrayal wherever you find it.

Often when she liked a picture she found that she was liking some part of herself, some part of her that was in accord with the picture

You play, you win, you play, you lose. You play.

My own father came out of the sea and went back that way... His splintered hull shored him long enough to drop anchor inside my mother. Shoals of babies vied for life. I won.

This has been my difficulty. The difficulty with my life. Those well-built trig points, those physical determinants of parents, background, school, family, birth, marriage, death, love, work, are themselves as much in motion as I am. What should be stable, shifts. What I am told is solid, slips. The sensible strong ordinary world of fixity is folklore. The earth is not flat. Geometry cedes to algebra. The Greeks were wrong.

Why be happy when you could be normal ?

He needed some sort of membrane between himself and experience, which, for him, became language.(Jeanette Winterson on T.S.Eliot)

That is what literature offers - a language powerful enough to say how it is. It isn't a hiding place. It is a finding place.

Some folk say I'm a fool, but there's more to this world than meets the eye.' I waited quietly. 'There's this world,' she banged the wall graphically, 'and there's this world,' she thumped her chest. 'If you want to make sense of either, you have to take notice of both.

In cetatea cuvintelor despre care v-am povestit, mirosul de fragi era mirosul caracteristic casei despre care inca nu v-am povestit.

When was the last time you looked at anything, solely, and concentratedly, and for its own sake? Ordinary life passes in a near blur. If we go to the theatre or the cinema, the images before us change constantly, and there is the distraction of language. Our loved ones are so well known to us that there is no need to look at them, and one of the gentle jokes of married life is that we do not.

Shuttered like a fan no-one suspects your shoulder blades of wings. While you lay on your belly I kneaded the hard edges of your flight. You are a fallen angel but still as the angels are; body light as a dragonfly, great gold wings cut across the sun.

Art is not documentary. It may incidentally serve that function in its own way but its true effort is to open to us dimensions of the spirit of the self that normally lie smothered under the weight of living.

Art can make a difference because it pulls people up short. It says, don't accept things for their face value; you don't have to go along with any of this; you can think for yourself.

The line between life and death is a couple of inches at most. The width of a door that connects two rooms.

If I rush at this relationship it's because I fear for it. I fear you have a door I cannot see and that any minute now the door will open and you'll be gone. Then what? (...) You said, 'I'm going to leave.' I thought, Yes, of course you are, you're going back to your shell. I am an idiot. I've done it again and I said I'd never do it again.

yet when she first left me i thought i had blood poisoning ,i couldn't forget her,now she seemed to have forgotten everything .it made me want to shake her ,to pull all my clothes in the middle of the street and yell remember this body time is a great deadener ,people forget, get bored, grow old , go away. she said that not much had happened between us anyway, historically speaking

Turn up for work. Discipline allows creative freedom. No discipline equals no freedom.

When it is time to get to work, I go away completely and don't do anything except the work. And that can be 16 hours a day.

the power of a text is not time-bound. The words go on doing their work.